Tips for the Search

The CTAN search pro­vides some pow­er­ful fea­tures to ex­press
the query. You can use these fea­tures to get bet­ter re­sults. Some of the
fea­tures are de­scribed here. This fea­ture list is by far not com­plete. It
will be ex­tended when re­quired.

Pre­fix Search

The search term is split into words. The search en­gine finds the items
con­tain­ing all search terms at the be­gin­ning of words.
The com­par­i­son is per­formed case-in­sen­si­tive.

This is the same as adding the wild­card char­ac­ter * to the end of all
words.

Word-based Search

The search term is split into words. The search en­gine finds the items
con­tain­ing all search terms as words. The or­der of the words just in­flu­ences
the or­der of the hits. The com­par­i­son is per­formed case-in­sen­si­tive.

Wild­card Search

The meta-char­ac­ters * and ? can be con­tained in
the search term to de­note an ar­bi­trary num­ber of char­ac­ters and a sin­gle
char­ac­ter re­spec­tive.

bibtool*

Note that wild­cards are not al­lowed at the be­gin­ning of a word.

Ex­clud­ing words

Pre­fix­ing a word by - or NOT (in up­per case) will
ex­clude all hits for this word from the re­sults.

sudoku -related

sudoku NOT related

Boolean Com­bi­na­tions

A boolean query can be for­mu­lated with the op­er­a­tors AND,
OR, and NOT.
Paren­the­ses can be used to group sub-ex­pres­sions.

tex AND NOT knuth

Fuzzy Search

If you are not sure about the spelling of your search you can ini­ti­ate a
fuzzy search. For this pur­pose ap­pend a ~ to the search word.
This search also re­turns hits which are not lit­eral matches but
vari­a­tions thereof.